Sophie Gail Overture Les Deux Jaloux Program Notes Sophie Gail Overture Les Deux Jaloux. Composer Sophie Gail was a well-known opera singer in and around 1790s and early 1800s Paris. She composed her opera, The Jealous Two, after several songs (for voice and piano), and some one-act operas. It’s a Read more…
William Grant Still Patterns Program Notes William Grant Still Patterns. Although the Still family has deep Philadelphian roots, William Grant Still was born in Mississippi, but spent his childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, in its well-established artistic and intellectual Black community. There, he was a few years younger than his Read more…
Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture Tchaikovsky softly evokes Friar Laurence and the chants of the cloister in opening his Romeo and Juliet Overture. After modulations and suspensions (notes that may clash but then give way) suggest Romeo’s early feelings about “love [being] a smoke raised the fume of sighs,” Read more…
Witold Lutosławski Little Suite (Mala suita) Fife (Allegretto) Hurrah Polka (Vivace) Son (Andante) Dance (Allegro molto) Lutosławski’s Little Suite, with its infectious energy and folk-inspired themes, was one of the most frequently performed works in 1950s Poland, and its melodies are drawn the town of Machowa, an hour’s drive east Read more…
Margaret Bonds Montgomery Variations Program Notes Margaret Bonds came from a middle-class Chicago family. She showed early talent as a pianist and composer, and studied with Florence Price as a teenager. Her studies at Chicago’s Northwestern University yielded both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Near the end of her studies, she Read more…
Strauss Fledermaus Overture Program Notes Strauss’s Fledermaus has a convoluted plot with many comedic opportunities. Prince Orlofsky is throwing a ball (in the original version it was to be a New Year’s party), and there are all sorts of ploys at hand. The character Falke is trying to visit revenge Read more…
Strauss Death and Transfiguration Program Notes Three themes of the Romantic era are love, nature or death, and the Romantics focused on creating a personal and subjective response in the audience, to have them feel what they felt. Stunningly, Strauss was 24 years old when he began this piece. (It Read more…
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition Program Notes Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition. Like other members of The Mighty Handful (Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, et al), Modest Mussorgsky aimed to create a Russian musical sound. As a very young child, he’d been drawn to the piano, musically retelling his nanny’s Russian tales. In St. Read more…
Kent Kennan Night Soliloquy Program Notes Kent Kennan composed little, if anything, in his last 65 years. Yet Howard Hanson recorded some of his music with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury Records, and he probably received encouragement to compose more. Instead, he concentrated on his teaching, which for most of Read more…
John Adams The Chairman Dances Program Notes It’s an amazing thing to see “Nixon in China” in the theater. Set in 1972, the opera is about the three days Nixon spent in Beijing, along with Pat Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who had Read more…